September 09, 2004 12:46 PM

Aliens Redux

A while back, I posted an entry called "Statistics
and Aliens" where I claimed that the Drake
Equation, a famous way of estimating the number of intelligent
civilizations in our galaxy, may be wrong because it assumes
statistical independence. I also noted that the possibility that we
would be able to intercept the internal communications of other
civilizations seems remote to me because information
theory dictates that the better the technology, the more
noise-like a communication will seem.

I've now found an
article in New Scientist from a few weeks ago in which Frank Drake
himself notes that our own technologies are making us harder and
harder for aliens to hear (and thus presumably their technologies
might make it hard for us to hear them), though the article doesn't
mention the same information theoretic grounds that I do.

Also, so far as I know, I've seen no one else who questions the
assumption of statistical independence in the Drake equation, which
seems strange. Is anyone aware of another source that mentions that
problem?

September 08, 2004 11:37 PM

Bruce Sterling on The Singularity

At some point in the next few decades, we're going to be able to build
artificial
intelligences that are comparable to human beings in intellectual
power. Moore's
Law being what it is, soon thereafter, we'll be able to build AIs
that are smarter than people, and pretty soon after that, those AIs
will be building yet further AIs that are far smarter than
people, and so forth.

It is possible that before we learn how to build AIs, we'll first
learn how to perform "intelligence amplification" or "IA", augmenting
human brains with electronics or other mechanisms to produce
intelligences that are better than human. Such amplified humans would
be able to work on improving the amplification technologies, which may
also lead to massively superhuman intelligences.

It is possible that the first superhuman intelligences will merely be
faster versions of human intelligence implemented by simulating the
human brain on a very fast hardware platform. Vinge calls this "weak"
superhumanity, but it is still potentially quite impressive. K. Eric Drexler in
his fantastic (but somewhat dated) book "Engines
of Creation" (also available online), presents
a mechanism for simulating a human brain, using a conservative
nanotechnological design, that would run about a million times faster
than a human brain. Such a being could perform a century's worth of
engineering work in less than an hour. Presumably such minds might
improve their own hardware designs with breathtaking speed. Drexler's
design is a pure gedankenexperiment
— no one is likely to ever build the precise construct he
describes, but since it there is solid evidence that it could be
built, it tells us that at least such a construct is
possible, even if far better could be made.

Vinge notes that once there are intelligences that are substantially
smarter than people, and which rapidly become smarter still, the world
will rapidly change beyond all human comprehension. The limits of
human intelligence will no longer be limit the speed of technological
progress, and humans will no longer be the apex of our civilization.

Vinge wrote a
famous essay some years ago on this topic, coining the term "The
Singularity" for it. Once superhuman intelligence appears, our models
of the future and our ability to predict what lies ahead get
irreparably ruptured. No dog, however clever, will ever understand
integral calculus, and it is equally unlikely that humans would
understand the science and technologies of beings far smarter than we
are. (Vinge's essay is very well written — I encourage people
to give it a read.)

Vinge notes in his essay (as of 1993) that he would be surprised if
such changes happened before 2005 or much later than 2030, but the
dates are immaterial in my opinion. Whether such events happen in ten
years or in a hundred years, the impact will be the same, and thirty
years or a century are both a blink of an eye in the context of the
whole of human history.

Do I believe Vinge? Very much so. Human intelligence is the result of
physical processes taking place in the brain, and we will thus
someday be able to simulate those processes with machines. We will
likely also design machines that produce the same effect by different
means, much as cars are not like horses but also provide
transportation. To claim that we could never gain such abilities is to
claim that human intelligence arises from a supernatural "soul" of
some sort, and I see such overwhelming evidence against that claim
that I cannot give it even passing credence. That which arises from a
physical process we can eventually simulate and understand, and that
which we can simulate and understand we can improve. Whether we enter
the post-human era today, tomorrow or in two centuries is immaterial
— it will happen eventually if we don't kill ourselves off
first.

This brings us to the topic of Bruce Sterling.

Sterling has recently made vague attacks on Vinge's arguments in two
public fora. One such attack was a speech he gave to the Long Now Foundation (available here). Today, I was pointed at
an
opinion piece in Wired with much the same content.

Here's an excerpt from the Wired essay:

A singularity looks great in special f/x, but is there any substance
in the idea? When Vinge first posed the problem, he was concerned that
the imminent eruption in artificial intelligence would lead to
ubermenschen of unfathomable mental agility. More than a decade later,
we still can't say with any precision what intelligence is, much less
how to build it. If you fail to define your terms, it is easy to
divide by zero and predict infinite exponential evolution. Sure,
computers might someday awaken into something resembling human
consciousness, but we have no metrics to describe that awakening and
thus no objective way to recognize it if it happens. How would you
test a claim like that?

Sterling misrepresents Vinge's
essay on the singularity completely. Vinge made no claims to
understand intelligence, but his argument does not require that we
understand it precisely. Vinge never claimed that such breakthroughs
would have happened by now, and his argument in no way requires a
particular timetable. He made no claims about "infinite exponential
evolution", either.

"Consciousness" is also a red herring. Asking "how would you test a
claim like that" is clearly the wrong question to ask — Vinge's
claim is not about "consciousness" and there is no need to test the
"consciousness" of the superhuman intelligences. We will know if they
are more intelligent than us by their actions, such as building
constructs we cannot understand, and whether they are "conscious" or
not is immaterial to the argument.

Sterling's tone throughout is laden with indirection. He doesn't ever
come out and say "I think the Singularity is implausible for the
following reasons" — much like astrologers or the Oracle of
Delphi, he avoids making specific claims and thus can't be found to be
obviously wrong.

The comments he does make, though, seem stunningly off the mark:

Even if machines remain inert and dumb, we still might provoke a
singularity by giving humans a superboost. This notion is catnip for
the techno-intelligentsia: "Wow, if we brainy geeks were even more
like we already are, we'd be godlike!" Check out the biographies of
real-life geniuses, though - Newton, Goethe, da Vinci, Einstein - and
you find vulnerable mortals who have difficulty maintaining focus. If
the world were full of da Vincis, we'd all be quarrelsome, gay,
left-handed Italians who couldn't finish a painting.

Glib, but I hardly see what it has to do with Vinge's argument at
all. Either minds are a physical phenomenon, and gedankenexperiments
such as Drexler's point to ways that we might produce faster (and
possibly "better") minds than our own, or they aren't physical
phenomena and cannot be understood or simulated. Perhaps Sterling
claims the mind does not arise from a physical phenomenon, though that
would seem to be solidly contradicted by the science of our
day. Perhaps he believes artificial intelligence research is forever
doomed to fail even if the mind arises from physical phenomena, though
I see little reason to assume that either. Perhaps he truly believes
that all superhuman intelligences would be crippled by Attention
Deficit Disorder, but that is a pretty implausible claim, and he
certainly gives no evidence for it. Perhaps he finds the idea of
people exploring this avenue of research distasteful or perhaps he
hates smart people (the "brainy geeks" comment seemed a bit
anti-intellectual), but any such distaste doesn't appear to have any
relevance to whether Vinge is right or not.

Unfortunately, Sterling makes no arguments in any of these
directions. He merely insinuates. Since he's fairly non-specific about
what it is that he's claiming, one can't be completely sure of what it
is that he believes.

What Sterling lacks in specificity, however, he makes up for in
irrelevant and fairly bizarre side commentary, such as this:

More likely yet, we live in a dull, self-satisfied, squalid eddy in
history, blundering around with no concept of progress and no sense of
direction. We have no idea what we really want from our own lives or
from society. And no Moore's law rising majestically on any 2-D graph
is ever going make us magnificent or spiritual when we lack the will,
vision, and appetite for spiritual magnificence.

None of this, of course, in any way intersects with Vinge's arguments
in the slightest. It is a complete non-sequitur.

In spite of the fact that Sterling's final paragraphs are in no way
relevant to his claims about the ides of the Singularity, I still must
take issue with them. I don't see our society making "no progress" or
being particularly "squalid". Frankly, it is amazing how much we've
done even in the last couple of decades to reduce poverty, disease and
other human ills. Virtually any objective measure one chooses to pick,
from life expectancy among the poorest 20% of the population to the
number of people living without indoor plumbing, will show that pretty
clearly.

I also have to admit that I have no particular desire in my life for
the "spiritual". If by "spiritual" he means religion, I have no belief
in the supernatural, and no desire to see society waste more of its
time on such flim-flam. If by "spiritual" he means not enough people
share his particular tastes for art or architecture, well, a person
who truly appreciates human freedom does not deny others the right to
their own taste.

Of course, as I've noted, since Sterling is extremely vague, it is
hard to know what he means with any precision. What I can say, though,
is that he appears to have failed to make a coherent case against
the idea of the Singularity.

September 07, 2004 3:00 PM

Aging and Reliability Theory

Allan Schiffman's blog also has an
entry describing a
very interesting article in IEEE spectrum about aging. The article
analyzes the aging process in terms of the discipline of reliability
engineering, which is an interesting new approach. See Allan's blog or
the article itself for details. A more detailed paper is available here.

I'm pleased to see that the problem of preventing aging is finally
beginning to get serious attention from a variety of researchers, and
that it is even being discussed in mainstream technical and scientific
publications.

September 07, 2004 1:52 PM

Is the Placebo Effect a Myth?

The Gene Expression blog recently reminded
me of a study
done a few years ago that debunks the placebo effect. I'm pretty
surprised that it hasn't gotten more attention, especially since it
has a lot of implications for the question of whether the mind can
have significant impacts on the health of the body. I similarly note a
study
announced a couple of months ago that debunks the notion that
elderly people can delay their own deaths until after major holidays.

August 27, 2004 11:42 AM

New Jaw Grown on Patient's Back

The BBC
reports on a man who had lost his jaw bone due to cancer. Doctors
have grown him a new one:

After taking a 3D computer tomography (CT) scan of the patient's head,
they used computer aided design to recreate the missing portion of the
jaw-bone (mandible).

The design was used to construct a teflon model, which was then
covered with a titanium cage.

The teflon was then removed, and the cage filled with bone mineral
blocks, coated with bone marrow and a protein which accelerates bone
growth.

They then implanted the scaffolding they had created under a muscle in
the man's back, and waited. Bone grew into the scaffolding, which was
then transplanted into the man's jaw. The transplant has "taken", and
the patient is eating solid food again for the first time in years.

August 26, 2004 6:06 PM

Transhumanism is Dangerous, says Francis Fukuyama

"What ideas, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the
welfare of humanity?" That question was posed to eight prominent
policy intellectuals by the editors of Foreign Policy in its
September/October issue (not yet available online). One of the eight
savants consulted was Francis Fukuyama, professor of international
political economy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies, author of Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the
Biotechnology Revolution, and a member of the President's Council on
Bioethics. His choice for the world's most dangerous idea?
Transhumanism.

I'm amused to see that Transhumanism is
being taken seriously enough to be denounced by the intellectual
famous for telling us that we
have reached the end of history. (Fukuyama's idea of the end of
history is the liberal Western democracy. At least this is a more
pleasant thought than that of Fukuyama's inspiration Hegel, who believed
history ended with the 19th century Prussian state, or another
philosopher inspired by Hegel, Karl Marx, who
thought the end of history would be the dictatorship of the
proletariat.)

For those not in the know, "Transhumanism" is the idea that it may be
desirable for humans to transcend their current biological limitations
by technological augmentation or transformation. We are all currently
limited in our lifespans, and in our physical and intellectual
abilities. The transhumanists ask, why be limited? We nearly have the
ability to modify ourselves in wonderful new ways, ranging from
biochemical modifications all the way up to uploading our
consciousnesses into computers. Why not, they ask, be more than human?

I must confess that I, too, espouse this "dangerous idea". I think it
would be very pleasant to have a better memory, more intellectual
capacity, the ability to think more clearly, a longer (or unbounded)
lifespan, etc., and I see very little wrong with taking steps in
that direction.

If it offends some people who don't like the idea of changing
themselves, well, they can remain as they are. Live and let live. The
libertarian principle says everyone should get to live their lives in
peace provided they let others do the same, and if they prefer to die
after a mere 80 or 100 years, or to leave their minds at their current
capacity, I have no objections — so long as they don't interfere
with me peacefully pursuing life, liberty and happiness in my own way.

However, there are those out there who aren't happy about people
thinking these kinds of thoughts. Fukuyama is hardly the only person
worried about the strange doings in the technosphere. Bill Joy has
made a bit of a name for himself spreading his own brand of
technological alarmism, and there are numerous others.

Am I worried that these anti-technology maunderings will slow the rate
of technological progress? Not really. Even if the majority adopts a
radically luddite policy (and, in fact, especially if they do), those
that disobey will gain a strong competitive advantage. There is
therefore fairly strong economic (and by the same token,
evolutionary) pressure towards disobedience of such a stricture. In a
world with hundreds of countries, some people somewhere will do the
sorts of research that the "civilized" deem inappropriate. If the
civilized really forswear the same technologies, they won't have the
tools with which to stop the "uncivilized" anyway — they'll be
out-gunned. There is therefore a very strong reason to believe that,
at best, luddism could only slow down technological progress for a
while — it could not stop it.

More to the point, although people often fear change, I think that it
would be very difficult for governments to organize to stop it very
effectively. They would have to do things like banning scientific
research, improvements in computer technology, and such. I don't think
that is going to happen. Even with substantial negative attention
brought to bear, it only took a few years between Dolly the
Sheep and the first
successful production of cloned human embryos in South Korea. I
doubt other attempts to slow progress will be particularly more
successful.

The transhumanist idea that Fukuyama worries about is already out
there, and ideas cannot be unthought. The transformation of much of
the human race will happen. The question now is only whether to join
in, or to stay behind, frightened of the opportunities the future will
bring.

August 26, 2004 11:39 AM

Science News in Brief

I try to blog about neat scientific advances that I hear about, but it
is getting harder to keep up with them. The pace these days is just
overwhelming. Here are just a few things I've noticed recently.

The BBC reports
about a group that has found ways to use "vaccines" to substantially
down-regulate allergic responses.

The Gene Expression blog reports on
an instance of one species of fish splitting into two species within
twenty years. (I'm always amazed that people can still claim that
evolution is "unproven".)

Science Magazine published
a paper
reporting the use of femtosecond laser pulses in combination with
STMs to observe the
motion of individual carbon monoxide molecules on a copper
surface.

The BBC reports that
a single protein in the brain, called NPS, appears to act as a major
signal in both sleep and anxiety signaling pathways.

The FuturePundit blog reports
that silencing either the TLR4 gene or the related CD14 signaling gene
resulted in the substantial reduction of age related weight gain and
bone loss in mice.

New Scientist reports
that increasing the production of a protein called PPARdelta in the
muscles of mice resulted in a two-thirds reduction in weight gain when
the animals were fed a high fat diet. More interestingly, the mice
also were able to run 92% longer than the controls. Both effects
appear to have resulted from a doubling in the production of
so-called "slow twitch" muscle in the mice.

There were a lot of other articles I've seen recently, but those were
a few highlights. I know lots of people out there are skeptical of the
notion that we're approaching some sort of "Technological
Singularity", but as a passive observer of the science literature,
let me note that discoveries that would have made front page headlines
of mainstream newspapers a few years ago are now happening so often
that they barely get mentioned in the news sections of the science
press. The rate of discovery in molecular biology has become
especially stunning — gaining access to complete genomes has
opened up the floodgates as never before.

I'm becoming hopeful that major uncured illnesses such as Alzheimer's
disease, Parkinson's disease, many cancers, etc., are going to be
completely understood, and possibly even fully treatable, in the next
decade.

His name is Pat R. Mooney, and he is a high school dropout from Canada
with no scientific training.

Unfortunately, he's very effective even though most of his attacks are
based on extremely bad science:

[H]is Ottawa organization, the ETC Group, is widely credited with
being one of the first to raise health and environmental concerns
about genetically modified food. Its efforts, along with those of
other outfits like Greenpeace, led to a public relations fiasco for
the biotech industry. In Europe the name Monsanto, which sells
genetically modified seed, still exemplifies the ugly American
multinational. Because of the fear Mooney helped generate, Nestle and
others don't sell food with GM ingredients in Europe. Restaurants post
signs assuring customers meals are virtually GM-free.

Now Mooney, 57, has set his target on nanotechnology, the business of
manufacturing on a molecular scale.

My translation: nanotechnology could help rid the world of disease and
poverty, but an ill-educated Luddite in Canada with a talent for
getting press attention will be fighting hard to make sure that
doesn't happen.

By the way, genetically modified plants had (and still have) the
potential to radically reduce malnutrition in the third world, but
people have managed to scare themselves so thoroughly about the
technology that these crops may never be widely grown. Some countries
even refuse
food aid if it contains genetically modified grain. Thanks to the
luddites, millions may die needlessly of starvation. Every time you
see a picture of a child starving in the third world, remember Pat
R. Mooney. (You should also remember anti-globalization protesters,
government bureaucrats and lots of other folks, but that's another
story.)

August 20, 2004 12:57 PM

Hash Function Roundup

Ekr has posted a
good summary of the recent results from Crypto '04 on
the cryptanalysis of
hash functions. The general gist is that, as of right now, SHA-1 and its "SHA-2"
descendents have not yet been successfully attacked, but most of the
others have.

August 16, 2004 5:50 PM

More Hash Functions Broken

There is still no confirmation out there of the break in SHA-1, but this preprint, which
went up today, reports collisions in MD4, MD5, HAVAL-128 and RIPEMD,
all achieved with very little CPU time. That pretty much covers all
the cryptographic hash functions in use.

It feels as though once someone found the right thread to pull on, the
whole sweater started to unravel.

August 16, 2004 4:01 PM

Rumors of breaks in SHA-1

This will probably be incomprehensible to many of my readers —
if you don't know anything about cryptography you might not even care
about it. See this
Wikipedia article if you would like an introduction to the topic
of cryptographic hash functions.

Chen and Biham were due to report some attacks on SHA-0 this week at
Crypto.
Last week, it was reported that Antoine Joux had extended this work
into a full scale method for finding collisions in SHA-0 with time
complexity of 2^51, and would also be reporting his results at the
conference.

Ed Felten is now
reporting that a rumor has started at Crypto that someone has
further extended the Joux attack to an attack on SHA-1 and may
announce the details at conference later in the week. Since SHA-0 is
only of academic interest but SHA-1 is deployed in lots of
cryptosystems, this is naturally getting lots and lots of buzz.

As a side note, if this proves to be true, even if it is only a
certificational weakness, it will be very embarrassing to the NSA. It
is almost certainly the case that they would not release an algorithm
that they knew had even a certificational weakness, thus implying that
if there is such an attack, they did not know about it when they
corrected SHA-0 into SHA-1.

It is unclear how such a break would impact HMAC when used with
SHA-1 without knowing more details, if there are any details. Stay
tuned.

August 08, 2004 1:26 PM

More Victories for King Ludd

The New York Times is
reporting (sorry, the link will stop working soon) that "animal
rights activists" have managed to temporarily derail the construction
of a biology laboratory at Cambridge.

The story leads with a photograph of several protesters, one of whom
is carrying a sign which says "animal testing delays medical
progress".

Of course, that's beyond merely untrue — it stands reality on
its head. There is no good alternative to the use of animal models for
most medical research. A few days ago, I reported
on a breakthrough recently made on Alzheimer's Disease thanks to
animal experiments. Animal experimentation is the reason we have the
information we needed from that test — no rational person would
agree to be injected with an experimental substance and then killed
and autopsied a few days later, so we need to use animals for such
tests.

Almost all of modern medicine, from vaccines to surgery, has been
developed using animal models. Had we avoided all animal testing over
the last several centuries, human lifespan today would be dramatically
shorter.

On a similar note, I was recently reading an article
in Wired about Craig Venter's project to sequence the genomes of
vast numbers of previously unknown microorganisms. Venter's team is,
essentially, sailing around the world, collecting a few gallons of
water out of the ocean every couple hundred miles, and shotgun
sequencing all the DNA in the living matter within the
sample. Less than a percent of the microorganisms on the planet have
ever been observed, let alone sequenced, so this is really neat
work. The team is not only getting the first real glimpse at how large
the population of microbial species really is, they're also getting an
amazing sampling of previously unknown genes.

Unfortunately, it appears that lots of people, including the luddite
ETC Group, are organizing oppose his
work. They've even gotten his expedition halted in a few
places where he crosses in to various territorial waters. Why? I
really can't explain their rationale. I can't make out a coherent
reason for opposing such research in anything they say. They make
weird claims about "biopiracy" (whatever that might be) and such, but
really it appears their major dislike for Venter is that they hate
technology.

The article in Wired describes the bizarre events that happened when
Venter arrived at Tahiti, which is ruled by the French. Remember in
reading this that his activities consist of grabbing a few gallons of
worthless ocean water here and there and studying the single celled
microorganisms within — he isn't stealing ancient artworks or
running a slave ship or any such.

Venter was immediately notified by Rockville of a fax from the French
Ministry of Foreign Affairs politely informing him that his
application to conduct research in French Polynesia was denied. The
ministry understood that the Sorcerer II's mission was to collect and
study microorganisms that might prove helpful for health and industry,
but France wished to protect its "patrimony" by restricting
"extraction of these resources by foreign vessels." "It's French
water, so I guess they're French microbes," Venter told me when he got
the news.

[...]
[W]hen the Sorcerer II reached the French Polynesian island of Hiva
Oa in the Marquesas archipelago, the port captain there informed
Venter and Howard that their vessel was not allowed to leave the
harbor. Impounding a private foreign vessel merely on suspicion is
against international law, and Venter protested to the US State
Department, which informed the ministry that it considered the act a
violation of the honor of the United States. The Sorcerer II was
allowed to proceed as a normal tourist vessel, but with a warning not
to attempt to take any samples.

Venter later got permission to continue sampling, but with unusual
restrictions considering that he was taking nothing more than a few
gallons of seawater:

[...] When I wake up the next day, Venter is in the main cabin
reading an email from his office; Howard leans over his shoulder. Dill
is setting the table for breakfast. "So the big news this morning is
[...] the French are going to send a gunboat out to escort us," he
tells me.[...]"They want to make sure we sample where we said we
would. We're not supposed to tell the State Department about this. It
might put a chill on French-American relations. Being as how they're
so cozy right now and all," Dill says. "They'd like to know if we'd
like to invite an officer on board, too," Venter says. "How do you say
'fuck you' in French?"

This trend towards luddism seems to be spreading.

I wish I had the ability to explain the position of such groups
coherently enough to be able to attack them point by point, but I'm
afraid that my contempt is a bit too strong for me to be able to do
that. I really don't believe they have a rational position so
I find it difficult to try to explain their position. ETC, for
example, frequently puts out bizarre press
releases about scientific work that they obviously don't
understand even slightly. Most of their documents are so filled with
technical mistakes that it is hard to even count all of them.

However, even though they don't seem to have much of a coherent or
accurate argument on their side, such groups frequently are pretty
good at getting a lot of attention. I think this is because fairly few
people in the news media or in politics have any real personal
understanding of science and technology, so they are not able to
make informed judgments about the wild claims that are made.

I have to admit that I don't understand luddites well. Human
welfare has been radically improved by technology. The progress we've
made towards reducing poverty and human misery has been nothing short
of breathtaking. Even Marx seemed to
understand this pretty well. I get the feeling that the people who
used to embrace communism now have
switched to technophobia.

As a postscript, let me note that even the most radical
anti-technology activists out there like the Unibomber,
Ted Kaczynski, seem to make use of at least some technology in
their lives. I doubt Kaczynski could have survived through the winter
in his cabin without steel implements and an iron stove for heat. No
one would know of Kaczynski's ideas but for his willingness to use of
technology to write them down (even paper and pencils require pretty
significant ingenuity and effort to produce). Even written down, high
technology, including computers, has been the primary means by which
his ideas have been disseminated. Some such people argue that they are
merely using technology temporarily to try to fight technology, or
that they do not oppose "appropriate" technologies like wood
stoves. (Kaczynski doesn't seem to make any such arguments, though, or
at least, none that I can see.) Even so, there is tremendous irony in
anti-technologists making use of even primitive technologies, and
further irony in their communicating by any method other than
speech. I suspect, however, that the irony is lost on them.

August 06, 2004 5:27 PM

More People May Get "Mad Cow" Than Previously Believed

The BBC is also
reporting that variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease, a.k.a., vCJD, a.k.a. the human analog of Bovine
spongiform encephalopathy, a.k.a. BSE, a.k.a. "mad cow" disease,
may be carried by more of the population than was previously
believed. The incubation period of the disease may also be longer in
some cases than was expected. Bad news for people who like eating cows
that have eaten other cows.

August 06, 2004 12:51 PM

Article from Neuron on Alzheimers

Thanks to Steve Bellovin for the link. Steve also pointed out that the
Wall Street Journal carried coverage today about a conference where
that work was presented — apparently the conclusions are rather
controversial. Having just read the paper, though, I'd say it looks
like pretty good work assuming the results are reproduceable.

C. Elegans Mutation Rates Underestimated by 10x

The researchers raised hundreds of generations of C. elegans,
carefully making sure they knew which generation was which by
selecting a single organism to parent each new generation. (C. elegans
is hermaphroditic
and capable of self fertilization.) They then sequenced portions of
the genome in each generation.

This direct measurement revealed a mutation rate an order of magnitude
higher than had been previously estimated.

If this turns out to be correct, it has implications for everything
from evolution to cancer mechanisms to aging.

August 05, 2004 11:01 AM

Immunotherapy Halts Alzheimer's in Mice

A prominent feature of Alzheimer's disease is the development of
"plaques" of a deformed version of amyloid protein, known as "beta
amyloid". A long-standing hypothesis has held that the accumulation of
beta amyloid plaques resulted in a cascade of problems, including the
development of neurofibril tangles in the brain.

This
article reports a study in which the injection of antibodies
targeting the beta amyloid plaques into the brains of mice with a
close analog of Alzheimer's disease managed to trigger a response in
which the immune system cleared the plaques. Neurofibrillary tangles
associated with the disease cleared spontaneously shortly after the
amyloid plaques vanished. [Update: I've found another somewhat
better report from Science Magazine here]

The treatment only worked in mice with early stages of the disease.

This is a very preliminary sort of result, but it is really quite
exciting. Even if it does not lead to an immediate Alzheimer's
treatment for humans, it does lend extremely strong evidence to the
hypothesis that the beta amyloid accumulation in and of itself is the
major mechanism triggering the symptoms of Alzheimer's, and that
blocking the production of beta amyloid or clearing the plaques would
halt the progress of the illness.

For those unaware of the concept, it is a means to quantify
predictions by using markets. The notion is to set up tradable
contracts, much like futures contracts, which pay off not if guesses
about the price of wheat or oil are correct, but if guesses about the
future direction of technologies or world events are correct. It is
hypothesized that the implied predictions given by the market price of
the contracts will be more accurate than the educated guesses of
pundits, because traders will have a monetary incentive to follow
their heads rather than their hearts. There is some (as yet limited)
evidence that this hypothesis is true.

I'm not sure whether or not Idea Futures will have a dramatic impact
on society, but the concept certainly has intellectual appeal. Perhaps
someone should start trading a contract on whether Idea Futures will
have a widespread effect (if only they could formulate the claim well!)

August 01, 2004 9:03 PM

Another Very High Res Microscope

The Whitehead Institute at MIT reports
that they are working on an extremely high resolution electron
microscopy rig to permit direct imaging of the shapes of
molecules. The article on the web is a bit low on detail — if
anyone knows more and can tell me about it, please do.

Mechanisms that speed up the analysis of macromolecules will be of
substantial importance to biotechnology and (ultimately)
nanotechnology, so mechanisms that can achieve it, like (possibly)
this one, and like Magnetic
Resonance Force Microscopy, could be very important enabling
technologies.

Francis Crick, Co-Discoverer of DNA, has Died.

The discovery of the structure of DNA resolved longstanding questions
about the nature of the hereditary material and the manner in which it
is copied as one generation succeeds another. The structure, almost
immediately accepted, was electrifying to scientists not only because
of its inherent elegance but also because it showed how biology,
evolution and the nature of life itself could ultimately be explained
in terms of physics and chemistry. Indeed, the desire to replace
religious with rational explanations of life was a principal
motivation of Dr. Crick's career.

Crick didn't just co-discover the structure of DNA — he went on
to demonstrate how DNA is transcribed into proteins, and to instigate
and supervise much of the foundational work of molecular biology. I
think he'll be remembered for a long time.

But all that radiation has some activists and officials concerned
about the potential health implications of the antennas. "Apparently
the city is willing to gamble with the health of its residents for $25
million," said Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. He is introducing
legislation to require the companies to pay for radiation inspectors
as part of their franchise agreements. "There is no study that has
looked at the cumulative effect of these transmitters," he said.

That's got to be one of the dumbest things I've seen a politician say
in... oh, sadly, hours. I wish it was unusual to see a politician
spouting junk science and requesting rules to impede the construction
of new infrastructure, but unfortunately it happens practically every
time I look at the news.

For those not in the know, an 802.11 device puts out no more than a
couple hundred milliwatts, and once you take the inverse square
law into account, the capacity of such a device to transfer energy
to anything nearby is pretty limited.

The city is also filled with millions of such low power emitters. If
such devices were a problem, really we'd have much more serious
problems than a few new pole top devices. Even banning the hundreds
of thousands of existing 802.11 devices people have set up in their
homes wouldn't be enough. Cell phones, cell phone towers,
walkie-talkies, microwave ovens, microwave communications dishes,
television and radio transmitters, etc. are everywhere, in the
millions. We'd need to shut all of them down, too. That is ignoring
all the televisions, radios, CD players, computers, etc., all of which
emit a tiny amount of electromagnetic energy. If we got rid of all of
these things, maybe then the marginal change caused by adding some
pole-top 802.11 transmitters would be observable, even if it was still
completely unimportant to health.

Luckily federal law keeps municipalities from preventing the
construction of new cellphone base stations, but nothing protects
companies from the likes of Mr. Vallone. Lets hope people laugh
at him loud enough that he drops the whole thing, and soon.

July 28, 2004 9:03 PM

UK Academy Proposes Regulating Nanotechnology

The Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK are about
to propose new regulations governing nanotechnology,
long before any real nanotechnology has even be developed.

Best quote from the online article:

"Our main concern is that this is a new, powerful technological
platform that could be disruptive," said Jim Thomas, from the
campaigning ETC (Erosion, Technology and Concentration) Group.

"What does it mean for the poor, disabled, the disadvantaged - people
who are usually left out of the debate?"

He stressed that nanotechnology should be developed to benefit all,
and that public engagement was essential.

How the poor and disadvantaged might be helped by delaying things like
lifesaving technologies and radically less expensive goods, Mr. Thomas
doesn't say. Presumably the disabled might be angry about medical
nanobots going in, fixing their severed spinal cords and permanently
ending their blissful paraplegia.

I'm reminded yet again that the speeches the bad guys in "Atlas
Shrugged" make are not parodies — they're the sorts of
things real people say. It is almost enough to make me reach for a
pack of ciggies with dollar signs on the filters, only I think smoking
is stupid.

Perhaps we can introduce Mr. Thomas to the bureaucrats in Ghana, who
are also working to help
the poor. They may have ideas to trade about the public betterment.

July 28, 2004 2:27 PM

Wikipedia

I'd like to give the Wikipedia people a bit of a plug. They've
instigated a free encyclopedia, written by... well, anyone who cares
to help write it. ("Free" in this case means both the free software
and free beer senses of the word.) The web site that hosts the
encyclopedia is a "Wiki", a system that
allows anyone who sees a problem with a page or wants to contribute to
do so, immediately. There's literally a button on every part of every
page named "edit".

Wikis, like all "open source"
style projects, work on the stone soup
model. You start with a small implementation of an idea and convince
lots of people that they should help you improve it. What starts as a
kettle and a rock turns into something far, far better. The public good
"problem" is stood on its head. The non-rivalrous, non-excludable
nature of pure information doesn't bring the "market failure"
traditional economic analysis would predict, but instead becomes an
advantage begging to be harnessed.

If any project shows the power of an open source community, it is
Wikipedia. In a few short years, they've produced, for free, one of
the best information resources I'm familiar with, and they've barely
even started. If you haven't looked at Wikipedia, you should.

I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated [...]
to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water,
without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday
help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given
free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

I think he's on to something. Couple

An internet filled with the complete sum of human knowledge

$10 laptop computers with cheap satelite internet access

and I think that it will no longer be possible to keep people poor and
ignorant except if they want to be, no matter what their neighbors,
religious leaders and governments might want.

This seems like a good opportunity for me to mention that I think
Drake Equation is flawed. It calculates the number of technological
civilizations we should expect to find in our galaxy by multiplying a
few estimated quantities and probabilities. Unfortunately, it makes
the assumption that these figures are statistically
independent. I see no reason to make that assumption, so I
think the Drake Equation is incorrect.

If the Drake Equation's input values are statistically independent,
the development of one technological civilization would have no impact
on the development of other technological civilizations. That seems
unreasonable to me.

I think it's likely that any technological civilization will build Von Neumann
Machines, i.e. self replicating devices, that explore and colonize
the universe around them in every possible direction. Very likely
these constructs will travel at a large fraction of the speed of
light. Our own civilization is extremely young, and yet it should be
able to create such things within the next century.

I thus think it is likely that any species capable of technological
civilization starts expanding out at near the speed of light within
tens of thousands of years of evolving. We've been around for
something less than 1/100,000th of the life of the universe, which is
a blink of of an eye on cosmic time scales. You would therefore expect
that if another civilization is in your light cone, it
should already have traveled to where you are. (This is a variation of
the Fermi
Paradox.)

So, if there are other folks out there that we could hear, they should
be where we are already. However, if they were here already, we
probably wouldn't be. Intelligent life has a way of drastically
interfering with its environment. We've seen this phenomenon on
Earth, where we've spread over the entire planet in a miniscule
time. It isn't likely that other intelligent technologically capable
species are going to arise on Earth so long as we're here.

Thus, we hear no one because if we weren't the first out the starting
gate in our light cone, we wouldn't be here in the first place.

Does this mean I think SETI is a waste of time?
Far from it. Among other things, I have a mediocre record as a pundit,
so I could be wrong, and it would be a great mistake not to find out
if there is other intelligent life out there. However, I will not be
shocked if we hear nothing.

By the way, we may hear nothing even if there are other technological
civilizations out there. There is an assumption that with
sufficiently sensitive equipment, we should be able to pick up the
internal communications of other civilizations. Our own television and
radio broadcasts are, after all, likely to be detectable many
light years away. However, this will not continue.

Information
theory tells us that more densely packed a signal is, the more it
resembles random noise. We're getting better and better at using
bandwidth, so pretty soon I'd expect everything we send to be pretty
indistinguishable from random. This has already started to
happen. We're also starting to adopt spread
spectrum radio technology very widely, and that, too, has the
effect of making your broadcasts look like random noise. Lastly, in
order to maximize the available bandwidth, we'll start more and more
narrowly focusing our communications using phased arrays and
other active antenna technologies, so most of our communications may
be inaudible outside of teeny chunks of space.

Although the specifics of how we communicate by radio in the future
will change, the fact that new technologies will produce signals more
and more like random noise and harder and harder to hear at a distance
is likely permanent. It is a response to fundamental laws about
information theory and radio communications. I assume that if there is
anyone out there, they will be subject to the same fundamental laws,
so their communications will follow the same trend.

July 24, 2004 6:03 PM

Magnetic Resonance Force Microscopy

In the future, when we design molecular machines, it will be helpful
to be able to see the arrangement of the atoms in the individual
molecules we are working with. Until now, that's been rather
difficult. Currently, to determine the three dimensional structure
of, say, a protein, we have to resort to fairly crude and time
consuming methods like X-ray
crystallography. However, things may be changing.

The first devices seem to be capable of detecting spin flips in
individual electrons, and upping the sensitivity by a few orders of
magnitude seems straightforward. This could be a major
breakthrough. We may soon be able to directly image
macromolecules. The impact of that capability on chemistry, biology
and molecular nanotechnology would be huge.